Dusty Engine r4

[roninmagus]

I've just recently released on my website the 4th release of my task engine Dusty Engine for Irrlicht. I believe the project has matured greatly since the first release, and it is very stable. The engine is inspired by ideas I had while reading Richard Fine's Enginuity articles on gamedev.net.

Check out the new release here.

The current tutorial on the site is no longer up-to-date, I am working on 2 new tutorials currently that do more impressive things with the engine.

Here is a copy of the changelog for release 4:

====================
Changes in Release 4
====================
Modifications:
--------------
* Dev-c++ 4.9.9.0 support added to the engine. A library and
dll are supplied which have been compiled with Dev-c++.

* The last parameter passed to a task has been changed from an
integer containing the time elapsed since the last time the task
was executed to a TimeServerEntry. The task can then use that
object to query it's delta and also change it's delta (a
functionality not easily possible before.)

* New releases no longer have version Dusty Engine x.x.x
syntax, the releases have been renamed to "Dusty Engine
Release x" where x is the release number.

* Added a new optional value to send to TaskTree::AddTask():
lifeTime. It defaults to 0. If lifeTime is not 0, then
a task will automatically be erased from the task tree after
it executes a number of times equal to lifeTime. If lifeTime
is 10, the task will execute 10 times and then be erased
from the tree automatically.

* New class created, DustyEngine::TimeServerEntry which
replaces the irr::u32 id that is returned by
TimeServer::RegisterTimer(). Checking the time delta
and resetting the delta should now be done through that
object.

* Added 3 basic tasks to the engine: MoveTask, RotateTask,
and ScaleTask. These tasks each take a node and a vector,
and move, rotate, or scale that node by the vector each
update.

* A new, templated class has been added to the engine for the
purpose of managing task objects better: The TaskManager
class. It maintains a persistent list of tasks in memory
that can be easily accessed and released. This cuts down
on allocation and deallocation of memory for programs that
must create and delete many tasks. It also allows an easy
way to group many tasks of the same type together.

* Added a new virtual function Reset() to DustyEngine::Task
class. This function should be used to "reset" a task to
a default configuration (basically reset any extra member
variables.) This function is called by The new TaskManager
class when an object is released back to the task manager.

* Removed functions from the time server class which use integer
ids. The only functions in the timer server now are for
registering and unregistering timers and seeing how many timers
are registered.

[roninmagus]

I have placed up on the site another tutorial, there are now two up there. There's also 2 demos!

The first tutorial gives an explanation of how the task tree in the engine works, and the second shows code and explanation of the second demo.

Could anyone here give me a FPS count on the second demo? I'm wondering how it stacks up on different machines.

[Guest]

161FPS for your second demo(P4 3,06, 512MB, GFX5600)

[bal]

~560FSP for your second demo, though it looks like it goes at 15FPS...
First demo runs at 120-160FPS.